


Samurai Beginnings

by orphan_account



Category: Power Rangers Samurai
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen, Growing Up, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Meta, implied character deaths
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-09-28
Updated: 2016-10-08
Packaged: 2018-08-18 07:39:37
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,554
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8154361
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Things went a little different for young Lauren Shiba and her team.  Things went a lot different.  The world is about to face a Samurai team with different background and different rules.





	1. Red

**Author's Note:**

> So, new story for a new day. I will confess, I don't know where this is going beyond some vague ideas. It should be fun to find out, right? Thanks for coming along on the journey, I hope you enjoy the ride.

As far as she could remember, it started with the old man.  He came from the temple to see her and Jay-Jay, and everyone was very serious.  Lauren showed him her new shiny shoes and stood politely as he drew silver symbols in the air.  Silver, she knew, was for soul.  When the old man left, everyone looked nervous and sad, and there were a lot of whispers.

Then her daddy came to her, looking even more sad than before.  Then there was an ugly black dress and the new shiny shoes that didn’t fit quite right (Auntie Megan said she was growing), and two shiny boxes that made everyone cry.  One was big and they said Mama was in it and the other was tiny and they said Jay-Jay was in it.

Lauren was good, even if the man beside the boxes was boring and the chairs were uncomfortable.  She was good when they put the boxes in the ground and Uncle Grant helped her throw dirt in the holes.  She was good until she got home and could take off the shiny shoes that hurt her feet and the ugly dress that itched.  Then she asked Aunt Ume when Mama was coming home and they told her that Mama wasn’t coming back.

The screaming and the kicking released something inside of her and she felt better even though she got a spanking and no desert.

***

It grew the day that Aunt Ume came and hugged her and cried, but Daddy never came back and neither did Aunt Noelia.  Uncle Grant told her that Daddy had gone to be with Mama and Jay-Jay and Aunt Noelia had gone with them to watch out for them.

She cried and screamed for days.  She hit and kicked Aunt Megan when her Aunt tried to comfort her and threw the wooden stars she’d gotten from Santa at Uncle Grant any time she saw him.  She wanted her family.  She wanted her Mama to give her baths with the bubbles and Daddy to read her stories and she wanted Jay-Jay to steal her special dolls so she could yell at him and hug him.

Aunt Ume left first, moving out of the big house to a smaller house with her husband.  She still came up the hill every day, still taught her about letters and words and numbers.   Then Aunt Ume got cancer and had to go away to get better.

Uncle Grant left next.  At first he called her every day, but then he missed one call and another, then three days in a row, until finally he stopped.

Aunt Megan stayed the longest.  But then the day came when Aunt Megan introduced her to Mister Jack and said that she wanted to marry him and have her own children.

By then, she was eight and too big to scream and hit like she really wanted.

All that was left was Ji.  She didn’t really like Ji, because he made her do things that were boring.  He called them training.

It was the lonely time.

***

When she was thirteen, a man came to Shiba House.  He was an older man, dressed in a very nice suit.  His hair was mostly white and his black eyes were thoughtful and serene.  He looked at her, and she showed him her katas and her kanji, and he nodded.

Then he spoke with Ji behind a barrier for silence for a long time.

Then they called her to them.

Ji was sick.  He’d been sick for a long time and had never told anyone, but he had to go away to get treatment now.

She wondered if the man was going to be her new guardian.

He wasn’t.

The man had a school where they taught certain fighting techniques.  He wanted her to come be a student at his school.  It wouldn’t be a Samurai school, they said, but a ninja school.  She didn’t know what to say.

Ji asked to speak to her in privacy.

Jay-Jay, Jayden, was alive.  When the Nighlok had attacked, he had been smuggled away because he had stronger fire symbol power potential.  One day Jayden would come back, to help defeat Master Xandred with the special sealing symbol.

Ji wanted her to go to the ninja school to learn ninja styles.  The ninjas would teach her new ways to use fire and new techniques that would be a surprise for Master Xandred’s army.  She would be safe at the academy, just the same as at Shiba House.  While she became a Samurai-Ninja, Ji would be able to get the treatments he needed without worrying about her.

She looked at the ninja sensei and thought that he looked kind.

Lauren Shiba said yes.


	2. Green

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It starts with a shiny box and Papá crying. The big church is full of people who are crying, and she doesn’t understand. She wished her Mamá would come home soon.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There is a girl who is spanked once, slapped once, pinched an undetermined number of times, and sent to her room without supper. (Then fed oatmeal and vegetable soup for three days). No additional violence is explicitly stated.

It starts with a shiny box and Papá crying.  The big church is full of people who are crying, and she doesn’t understand.  Tía dressed her in a black dress with lace cuffs that itched, white tights and shiny black shoes that were bought specially from the story.  She got spanked when she complained because Mikey wore his church suit, and she wished her Mamá would come home soon.

Church was long and boring as always, and she didn’t understand why they had to come to church on Saturday instead of watch cartoons, but Tía pinched her when she fidgeted or tried to play around, and Papá had Mikey on the other side of him after they tried to poke each other.

Finally, she watched the small group of people sitting across the aisle.  They didn’t sing the responses, and they had trouble remembering when to kneel, and none of them carried a rosary.  Even Mikey had a rosary, and he was three!  She wanted to ask Tía why they didn’t know how to kneel or sing, but she didn’t want to get pinched.  But still, they were _grownups,_ why didn’t they know how to act in church?

After church, Tía kept strong grips on Mikey and her, while Papá stormed over to the strangers.  It was scary because Papá yelled at them and wouldn’t listen and she thought he was going to hit the man with the dark skin, but they left as a group.

People around them whispered about the strangers, and how mad Papá was.  No one seemed to know who they were but Papá and Tía.  Then they made her and Mikey get in cars and go to a park with lots of funny shaped rocks.  One of which looked like an angel.  Tía made them sit in really uncomfortable chairs in front of the shiny box while more people talked and all the grownups cried.  Then they put the box in the ground and Mikey dropped one of his shoes in the hole.

Then they went home and Papá went in his room.  As Tía helped her into regular clothes, she asked when Mamá would be back and Tía slapped her hard.  For the first time in her life, when she cried in pain, no one came to comfort her.  She was given no food and confined to her room.

It took three days of oatmeal breakfasts and vegetable soup dinners before she stopped asking for her mother.

***

She was ten when Papá was visited by a strange man.  He looked at her and made shiny silver light appear around her and Mikey.  Then he yelled at Papá and Tía without any sound.  She took Mikey outside, where the strange lights, and the arguments with no sound were not and showed him how to turn a cartwheel.

Papá and Tía were angry and upset for a long time and she spent a lot of time keeping Mikey out of the way.  At eight, Mikey didn’t really understand about hiding or being quiet, and it was her job to see that he learned.  Then one day Tía and Papá dressed her and Mikey in their good church clothes and took them to a big square building that said _Courthouse_ on it.  Papá told them to sit quietly and be good and Tía swore she’d spank them both if they misbehaved.

There was a judge, like she’d learned in school, and people in nice clothes who talked to him.  She didn’t understand.  Her Papá and Tía had a man in a suit who waved his hands and used big words but the old man who had yelled at her Papá had a woman in a blue skirt and jacket who gave the judge lots and lots of papers.

She focused on Mikey.  It was hard to keep him quiet and still, but when no one looked back at them when he whispered, she got him to play a counting game.  Mike loved numbers, so distracting him that way was easy.

Then the judge banged his hammer on his desk, and everyone looked mad.

Whatever had happened, she didn’t think it was a good thing.

They went home quietly and she wanted to ask what was happening.  Instead that night Papá and Tía filled suitcases with clothes and whispered angrily to each other while she made Mikey get ready and go to bed.

They were woken up in the middle of the night and Tía took them to the car.  They drove to the big boat and she tried to stay awake.  She had always wanted to ride the big boat like Papá did.  Soon, though, she fell asleep.

When she woke up, they were driving in the middle of a forest.  She kept quiet because Papá and Tía were talking.  The old man had tried to take her and Mikey away.  He wanted them to be like her mother, who had left them and never come back.  Papá had vowed never to lose her and Tía said bad things about anyone who wanted to take her son.  They mentioned places, some she’d heard of in school, wondering if they were far enough away from home that the old man would never come back.

They would drive for days and days before they stopped in a little town surrounded by trees.

***

She was fifteen when the man came.  He was about her dad’s age, but seemed younger for it.  He wanted her to come study at his special school, he said.  He told them that she could do amazing things if she learned, and that his school could teach her those things.  Dad was reluctant at first, even if she didn’t understand why.  She wanted out of the small town, she felt like she was exploding at the seams when she tried to fit in.

Finally, Aunt Marisol whispered something to Dad and he agreed.

Katalin “Kat” Rivera was to be a student of a ninja academy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Spanish Translations:  
> Papá- Daddy   
> Tía- Aunt  
> Mamá- Mommy
> 
> Well, here's an OC for ya. Katalin 'Kat' Rivera. Cousin of our well-known and beloved Mike. Please don't hate me for an OC, I've got plans for her.
> 
> Yes, they're Catholic. No, I'm not. Trying to bring it to the understanding of a four/five year old was a bit difficult.
> 
> Also, no, I don't know what's up with her father and aunt. I warned for child abuse, and I'm sorry if that bothers you.
> 
> I hope/plan to answer any other questions in further stories, but feel free to ask either way. I'll share what I can.


	3. Yellow

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She had always lived with her grandparents. As a little girl, her mom was a special superhero, saving the world from monsters.

She had always lived with her grandparents.  When she was little, her grandmother told her stories, how her mother had left to become a superhero.  How she was fighting the monsters to keep them safe, just like Grandma had done once, and how she would one day in the future.  It was part of her bedtime routine, hearing the stories of her mother, grandmother, and the heroes that had come before.  She would tell herself stories to, how her mother would come back and they would be a family.

She remembered the day her mother come home clearly.  It was the first time she’d ever experienced crushing disappointment and betrayal.

The woman who came back was not Grandma’s sunshine-child, there were few smiles and fewer laughs.  The woman brought with her a man she called her husband who was very much _not_ the young man in Grandma’s pictures, who had flown planes and died in a plane crash.  This was a stranger.  The woman also brought a baby in a pink blanket who screamed when anyone picked her up.

The crying made her head hurt and she wished she dared run away.

It was wrong, so, so wrong, it ripped away all of her dreams and illusions concerning her mother and when the woman and the man and the baby left, she immediately pretended that she’d never met the woman in the pictures in her grandmother’s big book.  Instead of stories about what her mother would be like, she threw herself into the things her grandmother taught her.  She balanced her life between her regular school, farm chores, and her real studies.  She taught herself to smile when she wanted to scream and cry, and she learned to shift from math to symbol powers and from weed pulling to kendo with hardly a break.

She took up the flute and learned to ride horses and beat up a bully to make her first friend when she was nine.

At ten her world flipped upside down.

Emily came to the farm.

She knew who Emily was, of course, she might pretend that her mother didn’t exist, but that didn’t stop her grandmother from getting rare letters from the woman.  She couldn’t ignore her grandmother reading aloud about Emily’s first words, her first steps, and when she went to look at the big photo album, pictures of a tiny, blond haired girl with a brilliant smile stared back at her on the last pages.

Still, she wasn’t exactly sure what to think when Emily came.  Emily was brought to the farm by a woman in a navy blue suit, dressed in tattered clothes, and she had a broken arm and a fading bruise on her face.  It took some time before she learned the full story, of a car crash that had killed her parents, leaving her alone in the world.

It was easy to like Emily, she found.  The little girl was quiet and eager to please, so she undertook to teach her about the farm.  Sometimes she forgot Emily was only four and tried things she wasn’t ready for, and sometimes they got into trouble for doing things they weren’t supposed to, but it was easy for her to become friends with her little sister.

Three days after she celebrated her fifteenth birthday, two men came to the farm.  One she knew from her studies.  He was the caretaker, but the other was a stranger.  They had come while she was at school, and while she knew they wanted to see her, she took the time to comfort Emily by playing her favorite song.  The caretaker was important, but Emily was family and that meant even more.

The caretaker wished to ask of her a favor.  He wanted her to go to a special school that didn’t teach the Samurai techniques, but instead taught the Ninja styles.  He explained that there were other members of the Five Families at the school and he thought they should learn together, in the triad style training the Ninjas had perfected.

Her grandparents were willing to let her go, but she hesitated.  Emily needed her too.

The caretaker made a counter offer.  If she went to the Ninja Academy, the caretaker would arrange for Emily to go to the boarding school in town.  There, Emily wouldn’t be bullied by the farm boys who didn’t understand things.  There, Emily could learn all the answers to the questions she constantly threw at her and her grandparents.

When Emily agreed to go to the boarding school; Serena Akiyama said yes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, I guess now is the time to say that I'm planning to do one for my versions of the Samurai. Serena is a canon character in a sense, although Kat is a new character. Don't worry though, we'll meet Mike and Emily again when the time is right.


End file.
